It's not logical, but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. Let him do his thing. Who knows?
The issue with competition, you see, is that someone has to lose, and it sure as hell isn't going to be the winner - until it is.
https://nmbu.brage.unit.no/nmbu-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250...
> Driving is not just an air pollution and climate change problem — turns out, it just might be the largest contributor of microplastics in California coastal waters. [...] Rainfall washes more than 7 trillion pieces of microplastics, much of it tire particles left behind on streets, into San Francisco Bay each year — an amount 300 times greater than what comes from microfibers washing off polyester clothes, microbeads from beauty products and the many other plastics washing down our sinks and sewers.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-10-02/califor...
"Rubber is also considered plastic, both natural (isoprene) and synthetic (styrene butadiene)."
Underground LRT (aka "a subway") are electric vehicles that travel in tunnels. In what sense is replacing a subway with an electric car that runs on rails "ground-breaking"?
I'm not sure what you mean by "illogical"; the idea of landing rockets has been around for 50 years. The issue is the technical challenges, and the cost. SpaceX have demonstrated that they have solved many of the technical issues, but haven't demonstrated that it's actually worth reusing rockets.
I suspect the same thing is true of digging tunnels. We have the technical ability to do it, but it isn't economically viable.
What would demonstrate that it's worth it to you? Aren't their reused rockets significantly cheaper than the competition already? Or is there some catch here?
Are they? Have they re-used their rockets commercially, outside of testing? I was unaware of that, but I don't follow it very closely.
Did they not ditch the idea of re-using the second stage, as it proved too expensive? If so, that demonstrates there's sometimes a gap between targets and reality.
This would be an iterative process. First, figure out how to successfully recoup the rocket. Second, see what issues exist with the integrity of these rockets, and work to fix those. Try reusing. Find more issues, fix those, etc. Eventually/hopefully, profit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_reusable_launch_system_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...
SpaceX milestone of using a Falcon 9 four times: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/spacex-returns-to-th...
I'm not in the industry so I could be missing something (e.g. it sounds like there's a lot of competition in the light-lift market, cubesats and that kind of thing). But it seems that on heavy lift, SpaceX is dominating on price, and that seems to be largely down to reusability.
At the very least it could've shown cost calculations for these tunnels. If they are as attractive as portrayed we would've had many more of them.
Single lane, 12 feet wide, 12 feet tall. Requires a tube 17 feet in diameter. Or 54.3 feet circumference. Two of those is then 108.6 feet.
A tube that can carry two lanes, 12X2 = 24 feet. Diameter is 26.8 feet or 84.3 ft circumference.
The perfect tunnel transports people horizontally in a very narrow tube.
First order analysis says there is no saving by using two tunnels instead of one. When you consider 4 one lane tunnels vs one tunnel with four lanes of tunnels, the four tunnel solution is worse.